“You all right, Mr. Dixon?”
The mud in his hair and the drip from the trees were running into his eyes, and he had to squint to look up at me. “Do not misinterpret the situation of this poor rodeo cowboy. I am honored to once again find myself surrounded by such noble men as yourselves. God bless America and the ground that men such as yourselves walk on.”
“Where are your boots?”
He studied the bloodied tops of his feet as though seeing them for the first time. “The detective stomped my toes proper and told me I wouldn’t need no foot covering for a while.”
“What do you want here?” the man in the baggy suit said.
I opened my badge holder. “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. What did y’all do to this fellow?”
“Nothing. He slipped down the slope,” the man in the suit said.
“He must have slid a long way. Did you say something to Miss Gretchen?”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“The woman who just left here. She was angry about something.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Right. What’s your name?”
“Detective Bill Pepper. I told the woman not to contaminate a possible crime scene. If she got her nose bent out of shape, that’s her problem.”
The crime scene technician was standing in the background. “Come on up to the cave with me. I want to show you a couple of things,” he said.
I grabbed hold of a pine sapling and pulled myself up on a footpath and followed the crime scene tech to the entrance of the cave. He was a rotund man with a florid face and the small ears and scar tissue of someone who might have been in the ring. He had put rubber bands around the cuffs of his cargo pants. “How you doin’?” he said.
“Better than that cowboy.”
“Here’s what we’ve got going on. The rain didn’t do us any favors. There was supposed to be a bunch of scat here, but I can’t find it. Same with the fingernail clippings. The boot prints are wiped out, too. Maybe somebody got here before we did.”
“Is Dixon lying about getting his feet stomped?”
“Detective Pepper said he wanted Dixon’s boots to be clean when he tried to match them with the tracks of the guy who was holed up in the cave. Sometimes Bill’s way of doing things is a problem for the rest of us.”
“Why is Dixon in cuffs? I thought he was coming in on his own.”
“He didn’t know the Indian girl’s purse was found last night behind a hay bale in the barn where she was killed. There was a receipt in it for a bracelet she bought from Dixon. The bracelet wasn’t on her body. The date on the receipt was the same day she disappeared.”
“What does Dixon say?”
“He weaves bracelets out of silver and copper wire and was wearing one in the Wigwam, and she saw it and wanted to buy it. He says he sold it to her for fifty dollars.”
“What was the deal with Miss Gretchen?”
“The gal who just went down the hill?”
“Down south you don’t call a woman a ‘gal.’ I especially wouldn’t do that with her.”
“I want you to understand something, Detective Robicheaux. Our department treats people with respect, our current sheriff in particular. The deputy and detective out there are the exception. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”
“What happened?”
“The lady, or whatever you want to call her, Miss Gretchen, came on a little strong about Bill’s treatment of Wyatt Dixon. When she was walking away, the deputy said, ‘Is she butch enough for you, Bill?’ Pepper goes, ‘I’d probably have to tie a board across my ass so I didn’t fall in.’ ”
“She heard them?”
“Probably. Would you tell her I apologize on behalf of the department?”
“If I were you, I’d tell your friends to do that.”
“She’s gonna file a complaint?”
“No, she’s not given to filing complaints,” I said, and looked back out the opening of the cave. “Is Dixon going to be charged?”
“Depends on what the prosecutor says. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. I didn’t get what you were saying. The lady is not gonna file a complaint? So what is she gonna do?”
I looked at the biblical message incised in the soft patina of lichen on the wall and wondered what kind of tangled mind was responsible for it. “It’s nice meeting you,” I said. “I hope to see you again. Tell those two morons out there they put their foot into the wrong Rubicon.”
“Sorry?”
“Tell them to look it up.”
AFTER THE FIRST interview, Alafair waited three days in the motel for Asa Surrette’s attorney to return her call. It was January, and snow was driving parallel with the ground, and the landscape was sere and stippled with weeds, and in the distance the hills looked like piles of slag raked out of a furnace.
It was a land of contradictions, settled by Populists and Mennonites but also by fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of John Brown. In spring the rivers were swollen and streaked with red sandbanks and bordered by cottonwoods that fluttered with thousands of green leaves resembling butterflies. The Russian wheat in the fields was the most disease-resistant in the world, the harvest so great that sometimes the grain had to be piled in two-story mounds by the train tracks because there was no room left in the silos.
Or the skies could blacken with dust storms or, worse, clouds of smoke rising from a peaceful town, such as Lawrence, where guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson spent an entire day systematically murdering 160 people.
Just after Alafair had given up and decided to return home the next morning, she got a call from Surrette’s attorney, the same one who’d negotiated Surrette’s allocution and sentence, trying to ensure that his client not be exposed to the death penalty reinstated in 1994. “Asa would like to see you again,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
There was a beat. “Why? To help with your project. To give his side of things.”
“Your client is a narcissist. He’s had no interest in helping anybody with anything. If he wants the interviews to go forward, the questions will be on my terms. He’ll make an honest attempt to answer them or we’re done.”
“You’ll have to work that out with him.”
“I’ll work it out with you. There will be no proscriptive areas of inquiry.”
“I think you’ll find Asa pretty forthcoming. He likes you.”
“Are you serious?”
“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t ask you back. What did you say to him, anyway?”
“He has one reason for wanting to see me again. I bother him. I told him why he took the body of one of his victims to his church and photographed it.”
There was another beat. “Ms. Robicheaux, there is one area that should not be explored in your interview. You know what it is, too.”
“No, I don’t,” she lied.
“Asa has admitted to eight homicides committed during the 1970s and ’80s. Those are the only crimes he will be discussing, because those are the only crimes he committed.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure of what he told me. I’m sure the authorities, including the FBI, have never found evidence of any kind that Asa was less than truthful about any of these matters.”
“The same guys who couldn’t catch him for thirty years? The same people who caught him only after he contacted them and then sent them a floppy disk traceable to a computer in his workplace?”
“It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” the attorney said.
It was snowing the next morning, in clumps that floated softly down and broke apart and melted on the highway and were blown into a muddy spray by the trucks leaving an oil refinery whose smokestacks were red at night and streaming in the morning with gray curds of smoke that smelled like leakage from a sewage line. Asa Surrette was locked in a waist chain,
waiting, when Alafair entered the interview room. Through the slitted window, she could see the snow blowing like feathers on a series of small hills that seemed to blur in the distance and then dissolve into nothingness.
“You keep looking at the hills,” he said.
“The winter here is strange. It contains no light.”
“I never thought of it in those terms.”
“Is it true there used to be eighteen Titan missile silos ringed around the outskirts of Wichita?”
“That’s right. They were all taken out.”
“Nonetheless, people here lived for decades with mechanized death buried under the wheat?”
“So what?”
“Had war started with the Soviet Union, this place would have become a radioactive Grand Canyon.”
“Yeah, that kind of sums it up.”
“Did that enter your thinking when you committed your murders?”
He looked at her with a gleam in his eye that was between caution and hostility. “No. Why should it?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why do you keep glancing out the window?” he asked.
“It’s the sense of nothingness that I get when I look at the horizon. The reality is, there is no horizon here. The grayness seems to have no end and no purpose. Is that how you felt when you stalked your victims?”
He wrinkled his forehead, craning around, the chain on his waist tinkling. “I think that stuff you’re talking about comes from Samuel Beckett. I read him in my literature class. I think his work is crap.”
“What did you feel after you killed your victims?”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
“Nothing?”
“What’s to feel? They’re dead, you’re not. One day I’ll be dead. So will you.”
“How about the misery you caused them in their last moments? The suffering their loved ones will undergo the rest of their lives?”
“Maybe I’m sorry about that.”
“You felt remorse?”
“Maybe I felt it later. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about things in sequence. People’s emotions don’t happen in sequence.” His wrist chain clinked as he tried to raise his hands in order to make the point.
“You haven’t answered the question, have you? What did you feel after you killed your victims?”
He straightened his back against the chair, breathing through his nose, his expression composed, his gaze roving over her features. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I thought about how I had stopped time and changed all the events that would have happened. I tore the hands off the clock.”
She felt her eyes moisten. “Did they beg?”
“What?”
“For their lives? For the lives of their children? What did they say to you when they knew they were going to die?”
“I already talked about all that.”
“No, you didn’t. You told the court only what you chose for them to hear. Do the voices of your victims visit you in your sleep?”
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“No, you don’t. I have no interest in statements about your behavior or your motivations. You’re a psychopath, and nothing you say is reliable. That means the book I write about you will be unreliable. You’ve had an enormous influence on me, Mr. Surrette.”
“Oh?” he said, the corner of his mouth wrinkling.
“I’ve always opposed capital punishment. Now I’m not so sure.”
His eyes dulled over in the same way they had during the first interview, as though he had gone to a place inside himself where no one could follow. “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”
“You didn’t stop killing people in 1994, did you? There were other victims, in other towns or other states, weren’t there?”
“No.”
“People like you can’t shut down the mechanism. It’s always there. It’s like a craving for morphine or pornography or booze or any other addiction, except much worse. How do you give up tearing the hands off the clock and changing history?”
“You’re not going to write the book, are you?”
“No. You’re not only untrustworthy as a source, you’re too depressing a subject. I’m going to do something else, though. I’m going to publish an article or a series of articles stating my belief that you never stopped killing. That if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, it’s you.”
The room was sour with his smell. He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted forward, his eyes glowering under his brows. His unshaved cheeks looked smeared with soot. “You came here acting like an intellectual. You’re nothing but a cunt and not worth my time. On the gate, boss man!” he said.
IT WAS DUST in downtown Missoula when Detective Bill Pepper entered a workingman’s saloon called the Union Club and ordered his first shot and beer of the evening. He knocked back the shot and drank from his mug of draft and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin, then tapped his fingernail on the lip of the shot glass for another. He was not aware that across the street, in the gloaming of the day, a young woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair had watched him enter the saloon and was now waiting for him to leave.
At eight P.M., just as the sun was setting, he emerged on the street and began walking toward the brick cottage where he lived on the opposite side of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. In minutes he reached North Higgins and walked past the steamed windows of a Mexican restaurant filled with college kids and family people, then past an old vaudeville theater and over a long bridge, the roar of the water and its cold, heavy smell rising from far below, the sun descending in a red melt where the river fanned out and disappeared between the mountains.
On the far end of the bridge, he turned right and descended a set of steps that led down past an old train station and onto the maple-shadowed sidewalk that reminded him of the neighborhood in Mobile where he had lived as a child. He lit an unfiltered cigarette and removed a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and tilted the flask to his mouth, closing his eyes while a warm burn radiated through his viscera.
Down the street, a chopped-down pickup with Hollywood mufflers eased to a stop under a maple tree that blocked the light from the streetlamp. The woman in the scarf behind the wheel fitted on a pair of dark glasses and layered her mouth with lipstick, then got out and looped a tote bag over her arm. She began walking on the opposite side of the street toward a small brick bungalow set close to the river. Baskets of petunias hung from the eaves of the porch. There was a swing set in the yard and a basketball hoop nailed above the porte cochere.
She stopped under a tree directly across from the bungalow. The lights were on in the front, and she could see Bill Pepper pacing up and down in his living room while he talked on his cell phone. She removed her dark glasses and took a tiny pair of binoculars from her tote bag and adjusted the lenses on his face. There was a coarseness in his skin that reminded her of the skin around a turtle’s eyes. His hands were big and knuckled, his shoulders as thick as a piano mover’s. He was the kind of man who drank whiskey as casually as someone flinging an accelerant on a fire. He had probably been a brig chaser in the Corps or with CID in the army or an administrative sergeant in the air force or a land-based pencil pusher in the navy; but he was someone who knew how to make use of the system and milk it for all it was worth while staying off the firing line.
She had sworn she was through with her former life. She had seen a counselor in West Hollywood, attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings in the Palisades, and worked as a volunteer at a shelter in East Los Angeles to get her mind off her own problems. Unfortunately, the latter was not as therapeutic as the former. She saw women who had been raped, sodomized, burned, and beaten until they were unrecognizable. She was daily witness to the terror that never left their eyes, because each of them knew she would have to return to a home where any night a man whose children she had borne, whose problems she had shared, whose body had sett
led between her thighs, would rip the door out of the jamb and perhaps tear her apart. Nor could Gretchen forget their haunted look when they asked how they could change their lives, where they could work, where they could hide. She never answered their questions. If she told them what she would do, they would probably flee her presence.
She remembered the early lessons in the trade that she had learned from a retired button man in Hialeah whom everyone referred to as Louie, no last name. Louie had grown up in Brooklyn with Joey Gallo and claimed to be the character in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight who walked Joey’s pet lion down to the neighborhood car wash and clipped his leash to the chain that moved all the vehicles through the water jets and revolving brushes. “Don’t let your feelings get mixed up in it,” Louie said. “The target broke the rules or he wouldn’t be the target. He made the choice, you didn’t. Don’t use anything bigger than a .25. You want the round to bounce around inside. One in the ear, one between the lamps. If he’s a rat, the third round goes in the mouth.”
Louie did not go out in a blaze of glory. He died in a lawn chair while watching a shuffleboard game at the retirement center where he lived. At his funeral, a woman in the viewing line leaned over the coffin and spat in his face. Many thought she was the widow of a victim. As it turned out, she was his landlady, and Louie had stiffed her on a winning lottery ticket they had purchased together. In death, Louie was no more dignified or intriguing than he had been in life, and all his lessons were no more than the self-serving rationale of a psychopath. The problem was that Gretchen hadn’t gotten into the life for money. What she learned from Louie was a means to another end—namely, to get even for the burns that had been inflicted on an infant and for the day a man named Golightly had forever robbed her of her innocence.
Don’t let your feelings get involved in it? What a laugh, she thought.
She put her dark glasses back on and dipped her hand in her tote bag and felt the can of Mace and the foamed butt of the telescopic baton she carried. She waited until a car passed, then crossed the street and stepped up on Bill Pepper’s darkened porch. The bulb above the door made a loud squeak when she unscrewed it. Beyond the house, she could see the moon shining on a church steeple and hear the river humming through the willows and rocks along the riverbank.